In Washington, the officials responsible for foreign policy and the
reporters who cover them have such fundamentally different jobs that
conflicts frequently erupt between them. Officials—especially
presidents, much of whose power stems from perceived competence and
popularity—understandably want to look good as they make and
implement policies. Officials generally want an orderly, rational
decision-making process in which decisions are reached—and then
announced—after discussions both within the executive branch and,
if needed, with leaders in Congress and in other nations. In other words,
officials want to control the content and timing of statements and other
initiatives relating to particular foreign policies. Based on several case
studies, including the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981, journalism
professor Philip Seib describes what can happen when media coverage of a
crisis undermines the president's control of the timing of decision
making:

News coverage can accelerate the tempo by heightening public interest.
Depending on which aspects of the story the press emphasizes, coverage
can also influence public opinion in ways that increase political
pressure on the president to act in a specific fashion, such as more
aggressively or more compassionately. The chief executive may soon
realize that the ideal of nicely insulated policy formulation has
evaporated. Instead, his every move is anticipated and then critiqued
almost instantly.

High officials also want to leak secret information when it suits their
purposes to do so, but not before and not by a lower-level official
unauthorized to do the leaking. A wry joke that made the rounds during the
Kennedy years—a time when the president himself was a frequent
source—sums up their view of appropriate leaks: "The ship of
state leaks from the top." Viewing favorable press coverage as
necessary for high levels of public and congressional support, presidents
and other top officials prefer to manage the news as much as possible.

Except during an obvious national emergency such as World War II,
reporters reject this vision of favorable, managed news as incompatible
with their jobs as journalists and with what they call "the
public's right to know." In competition with reporters for
other media organizations, journalists seek to "get the
story" and move it quickly into print. And because disagreement,
conflict, and failure are key components of the definition of
"news," the more these components are part of the story, the
more likely it is to be featured on the front page in newspapers or as the
cover story in magazines. As the Associated Press international editor Tom
Kent rightly noted at a 1996 conference at Ohio University,
"There's something in the human condition that finds a
greater fascination in bad news than in good news."

As long as stories are factually accurate and deal with legitimate public
issues, reporters and editors believe that America's freedom of the
press gives them the right—even the duty—to publish them,
regardless of whether they portray an administration favorably. From the
press's viewpoint, moreover, very few stories should be kept out of
print for the reason that officials often cite—national security.
To reporters, invoking national security is often an attempt to ward off
embarrassment or bad news.

Frequently, therefore, officials and reporters come into conflict when the
press publishes stories that officials believe should have remained secret
or when stories contain information that might upset delicate negotiations
within the government or with other nations. Officials often have been
scathing in their criticisms of journalists. "The competitive press
finds it almost impossible to exercise discretion and a sense of public
responsibility," Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote. "If a
man digs a secret out of an official or a department and takes it around
to the Soviet Embassy, he is a spy; if he digs out the same secret and
gives it to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world at the same time,
he is a smart newspaperman." Complaining to journalists about some
coverage his administration was getting, President Lyndon Johnson
commented, "I know you don't like your cornpone
president." Criticisms of the press by administration officials
have been bipartisan. Republican George Shultz, who served as secretary of
state under President Reagan, commented that "these days…it
seems as though the reporters are always against us."

Scholars often have used metaphors like "rocky marriage" or
"bad marriage" to characterize the relationship between
reporters and officials. At least the "marriage" part fits:
like married couples, the press and government are tied to each other as
each carries out its activities in the same home, Washington, D.C. And,
despite some journalists' claim that they occupy an inferior role
relative to officials, officials (in making policy) and journalists (in
deciding what is news) are equal in the same ways that married couples
are: neither partner has inherent power over the other, and both have ways
to get back at the other if they feel mistreated or disrespected.

The marriage metaphor is useful, moreover, because officials and
journalists have needs that only members of the other group can satisfy.
Officials (including members of Congress) need publicity for their ideas
to win support for them in the administration, in Congress, and among the
American people. In order to meet their editors' and
readers' demand for stories, reporters need officials who are
willing to talk with them about what is going on in the administration and
Congress. Because of these complementary needs, overall relations between
officials and reporters are inherently cooperative as well as adversarial.
Like spouses who wish to stay married, individual officials who desire to
remain effective have to keep talking to reporters even if some stories
have angered them, and individual journalists have to attempt to be fair
in writing their stories lest they lose access to the officials who have
been talking to them. Officials who repeatedly lie to reporters lose their
credibility and hence their value as sources; reporters who repeatedly
misrepresent officials' views lose their sources and hence their
ability to write news-breaking stories. These informal rules help to
maintain both the flow of information and the balance of power between
reporters and officials in Washington.

The difficulty with the "rocky marriage" metaphor, at least
as applied to dealings on foreign policy, is that it over generalizes. It
was much more persuasive for some presidencies (Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon) than it is for others (John Kennedy and George H. W. Bush).
Kennedy, a former reporter, understood how to deal with journalists on
foreign policy issues far better than Johnson and Nixon did. Like most
presidents, Kennedy often became upset after reading press coverage that,
in his view, was inaccurate or portrayed his administration unfavorably.
But at a press conference on 9 May 1962, Kennedy made it clear that he
understood and accepted the press's role in disseminating
information, interpretation, and criticism: "I think that they are
doing their task, as a critical branch, the fourth estate. I am attempting
to do mine. And we are going to live together for a period, and then go
our separate ways." Unlike Johnson and Nixon, Kennedy also had
friendships with several journalists; he generally was forthright and
respectful during frequent interviews, and he tried to be as forthcoming
as possible at press conferences. Overall, despite occasional deserved
criticisms of "news management," Kennedy's (and his
administration's) relationships with the press were fair to good,
especially considering the inherent conflicts between government and
press.

In contrast, Johnson and Nixon's press relations on foreign policy
issues typically were poor. In 1965, during the first year of the large
U.S. troop buildup in Vietnam, journalists began writing about the
"credibility gap," one definition of which was the gap
between the administration's statements about what the U.S.
military was doing in Vietnam and what reporters learned from lower-level
officials in Vietnam about what was actually occurring. David Broder of
the
Washington Post
offered a definition more narrowly focused on Johnson's efforts to
stifle the flow of information that helps to explain why many reporters
and members of Congress had become highly suspicious of the president well
before the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in early 1968 effectively ended his
political effectiveness:

I do not believe that the press…ever made it clear to the readers
and viewers what the essential issue was in the "credibility
gap" controversy. It was not that President Johnson tried to
manage the news: all politicians and all presidents try to do that. It
was that in a systematic way he attempted to close down the channels of
information from his office and his administration, so that decisions
could be made without public debate and controversy. Ultimately he paid
a high price, politically, for his policy.

During the Nixon years, some officials and conservative commentators
claimed that press coverage unflattering to the administration's
foreign policies (especially its Vietnam policy) resulted from
"liberal bias" in the "eastern establishment
press." That argument would have been much more persuasive if,
first, newspapers like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post,
magazines like
Time
and
Newsweek,
and the major television networks had been overwhelmingly supportive of
Johnson's Vietnam policies until he left office and then had become
highly critical of Nixon's approach, and, second, clear majorities
of the public and Congress had been strongly supportive of Nixon's
continuation of America's military involvement in Vietnam. In fact,
given the media's penchant for disagreement, conflict, and
violence, it seems certain that the "liberal press" would
have included large amounts of negative coverage on Vietnam and on
domestic dissent if Nixon's liberal Democratic opponent in 1968,
Hubert Humphrey, had been elected and had continued the war.

The fact that Nixon's relations with most journalists were, if
anything, more strained and adversarial than Johnson's also did not
help him get favorable coverage on Vietnam. The columnist James Reston of
the
New York Times
believed that Johnson and Nixon's difficulties with the press
stemmed from the same roots:

Mr. Nixon has had more than the normal share of trouble with reporters
because, like Lyndon Johnson, he has never really understood the
function of a free press or the meaning of the First Amendment….
He still suffers from [the] old illusion that the press is a kind of
inanimate transmission belt which should pass along anything he chooses
to dump on it.

Both presidents, in other words, neither understood nor accepted the
inherent equality of officials and reporters. Unlike the Netherlands and
some other democratic nations where officials normally do not treat
journalists as equals, this equality—and the tensions that partly
result from it—is a hallmark of America's political
system.